In the medieval period in Europe, churches and abbeys vied to own the body parts of saints who had died. Bones, skin, blood, clothes – anything to do with a famous saint could make or break the success of a holy place. It was big business, attracting all those pilgrims to your church because you had the arm bone of Saint so-and-so!
The Templars and the relics of saints
The Templars were as much, if not more, in to relics as all good Christians of the Middle Ages. They had a penchant for the brutally martyred variety of saint. Tied to a wheel and rolled down a hill or cut to pieces in the arena – that was the kind of saint a Templar wanted a bone from.
The Knights Templar were also noted for their veneration of female saints like Euphemia and Barbara. Even though the Templars were an all boys’ club, they nevertheless seem to have respected and honoured holy women.
Bones were not the only relics of saints – body tissue too!
But it’s often forgotten that bones were not the only medieval relics of saints. Bamber Gascoigne (1935-2022) in his book The Christians details St Elizabeth of Hungary lying serenely in state after her death. Around her, mourners prayed fervently for hours on end. Hmmm…take a closer look if you will. Because said mourners were actually busily clipping off her hair, nails and according to Bamber – her nipples!! All taken away to be venerated in churches all over Christendom.
The intrepid Bishop of Lincoln was shown a bone of Mary Magdalene on his travels and while nobody was looking, bit a fragment off and walked tight lipped back to a very grateful Lincoln.
READ MORE: The walking dead in the Middle Ages
How to get relics of Jesus?
Jesus presented a problem to relic hunters of the Middle Ages having ascended bodily in to heaven. No corpse in the tomb if you recall. Bamber describes how the medieval mind got round this little conundrum. Jesus must have left fingernails, his own tears, blood, milk teeth and….wait for it…his foreskin from the circumcision. Oh no, surely not. Oh yes, I’m afraid so! Indeed, there were several foreskins of Jesus doing a brisk trade as Gothic cathedrals soared upwards.
One priest even suggested that the rings around the planet Saturn was actually the foreskin of Jesus suspended in space – still detached from the Messiah. This was apparently a better explanation for what he could see through his telescope than the science of Galileo – a contemporary.
I’m always amused by the twig from the Burning Bush and a crumb from the Last Supper. Then there’s the ‘cincture’ of the Virgin Mary – a girdle she fashioned from camel hair, apparently. It dropped from around her waist as she ascended into heaven and was caught by Saint Thomas the Apostle – ‘doubting Thomas’, who famously wasn’t sure if the resurrected Jesus was real until he stuck his finger in the crucifixion wounds. Ah….his finger, by the way, can be found in the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome.
The hand of Saint James the Apostle has been on quite a journey. In the seventh century CE, it was in Venice. Then in the eleventh century, it was acquired by the Holy Roman Emperor and travelled north. When the Empress Matilda was widowed in the following century, she took it to her native England – where she was trying to claim the English crown from a male cousin. It then went to Reading Abbey but then the Holy Roman Emperor demanded its return. England refused. Fast forward to the sixteenth century and King Henry VIII was closing down the monasteries. The monks at Reading hid the hand in an iron casket and it was only rediscovered in the eighteenth century. It then went to a private collection but was later donated to St Peter’s church in Great Marlow, where it’s still today.
Years ago, I went with a friend to Prague who, unlike me, had not been subject to a Roman Catholic upbringing. I had to explain that yes, the little house in the middle of a cloister really was Mary’s house transported brick by brick from the Holy Land overnight by a team of very obliging and presumably muscular angels. He didn’t get it.
Very strange relics of saints
Closer to our own time, the church has still shown an ability to collect the most bizarre bits of saints. Teresa of Avila can be venerated by worshiping the sole of her sandal, a phial of her blood or a stick she used to walk with. Saint John Vianney (died 1859) is preserved, much like Lenin, in a casket. He used to sleep two hours a night and was visited frequently by the devil. At Westminster Cathedral in London – the Roman Catholic church and not the Protestant Westminster Abbey – you can see the body of Saint John Southworth, hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn gallows in 1654 – one of the English Catholic martyrs.
The True Cross is the relic that has always intrigued me. There’s a lot of fragments of the True Cross around. I’m inclined to think that if they were all put together, then Jesus was crucified on a California Redwood.
Now, if you want to know more about the Knights Templar – then get your hands on this book: The Knights Templar – History & Mystery – by Tony McMahon – published by Pen & Sword – available on Amazon, Waterstones, WHSmith, and Barnes & Noble.
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